In the electronic art it is becoming increasingly difficult to provide interconnections for circuit boards containing large scale chips and the like. For example, in computers and other high speed equipment, a backplane is often utilized for the interconnect and all individual boards plug into the backplane. The problems that arise in this type of interconnect is that bandwidth and speed is very limited.
Optical channel waveguides are capable of carrying large numbers of signals and have very broad bandwidths. However, it is very difficult and expensive to form input/output (I/O) connecters for optical channel waveguides and to assemble light generating and detecting components therewith. Also, for all connectors, except those introducing light rays at an end of the optical waveguide, the connections are large and inefficient.